My daughter recently had the experience of a large bird hitting her car windscreen, and smashing it, when she was doing about 70mph on a motorway. Fortunately the bird did not come through the screen, and there was no damage to life or limb (other than presumably to the poor bird).

As she was near Liverpool her first thought was that it had been a seagull, and later a pigeon. But the person who fitted a new windscreen said he thought it was a pheasant, as they are apparently notorious for this problem. The reason, he explained, is that pheasants have a shallow 'take-off' path. They run along the ground to get airborne.

But it made me wonder whether birds 'take-off'. Is there no other way of describing their going from rest into flight? Should it be 'take flight'?

I was about to flag this as genref, but found that Collins restricts the subject of the MWV to aircraft. AHDEL doesn't, Google shows that many people don't, and I don't.
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Edwin AshworthApr 1 '14 at 9:17

The OED had no flight reference for 'take-off' prior to aviation (first entry 1849). It does though have a recent reference to birds but notates it tranf.. That suggests to me that the term has been transferred from its aeronautic meaning. They must have said something before aeroplanes were invented!
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WS2Apr 1 '14 at 9:38

I just remembered my peacocks' take-offs. For such a big bird, it was astonishingly steep.
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medicaApr 1 '14 at 10:39

Google Books has a number of hits for "birds taking off". The first three pages of search results feature only specialist books about birds. But then on the fourth page I found this: "In the United States each year, 98 million birds die by flying into windows" (which then goes on to use "taking off" in relation to a plane).
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nxxApr 1 '14 at 23:45

OT but on a motorway I'd disagree with the fitter - pheasants avoid the noise more than some other birds (I've nearly hit them within a few hundred metres of the M5 many times on lanes, never even seen them from that stretch of motorway). The other options is some form of corvid - common around the motorway because of the roadkill and not very scared of cars. A pheasant in flight looks like a ball with a head and tail sticking out - a lot of tail if it's a male, which it normally is because the females hide.
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Chris HApr 2 '14 at 12:52

5 Answers
5

I remember reading about take off angles in wild turkeys and bred turkeys (to stock the forests), that wild turkeys had a steeper angle of incline than those that were raised in sanctuaries. From this, they could tell how much interbreeding was being done in the wild after release (the more wild genes, the steeper).

An article in the Journal of Experimental Biology (Effects of Body Size on Take-off Flight Performance in Phasianidae [Aves]) studied take off angles in Pheasants and other birds in that family.

They cite other studies of bird take offs from hummingbirds to swans...

...this trend will explain aspects of the ecology and evolution of flight. For example, within the Anseriformes, teal (Anas spp.) take off vertically while swans
(Cygnus spp.) take off in a laboured manner, with a shallow initial angle of ascent. Since teal require less room than swans for take-off, teal may utilize smaller ponds with less open surface area...

before getting down to their own work:

To evaluate the mechanisms responsible for relationships between body mass and maximum take-off performance in birds, we studied four species in the
Phasianidae: northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus), chukar (Alectoris chukar), ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) and wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo).

From another study from the scientific literature (this one measuring seasonal differences and take-off angles):

In particular, the ability to initiate flight through jumping is critical to predator avoidance and may be influenced by changes in body mass (Mb). Here we investigate seasonal differences in the jump take-off performance of high Arctic Svalbard rock ptarmigan (Lagopus muta hyperborea)...

Anyway, you get the picture. Apparently ornithologists refer to 'lift off' as take off (with or without the hyphen). It starts with the first downbeat of the wings once the feet are no longer in contact with any surface.

+1 But it is interesting that the OED does not have a pre-aviation term. After all, ornithologists have been around far longer than aeroplanes. I was fascinated that you had peacocks. I had always imagined that one only saw them in stately homes, like Chatsworth or Woburn Abbey. But perhaps you live in one!
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WS2Apr 1 '14 at 11:01

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@WS2 I take it you don't read much Flannery O'Connor?
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Kyle StrandApr 1 '14 at 17:03

@WS2 She lived on a farm with peacocks for a while and wrote about them in various short stories and an essay; they're one of her better-known recurring motifs. So if you'd like a good description of life on a poor farmstead (far removed from those fancy estates!) with peacocks, look no further.
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Kyle StrandApr 1 '14 at 20:03

Ronan, please note that an Ngram for a single term says nothing at all about, well, anything except proof of existence of that term. Ngrams are for comparison, and even then, they have serious limitations. Also, if the wiki article uses take-off, why would you state that take flight is the proper term?
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medicaApr 1 '14 at 11:17

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If you extend the Ngram to 1700, you'll see that the phrase doesn't really, well, take flight until late in the 18th century - the time period when human flight began. What's the indication that it's being used in relation to bird flight?
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Jon of All TradesApr 1 '14 at 22:22

@JonofAllTrades - OP's question was about whether birds 'take-off'or other. I am questioning, well, the certainty with which Ronan states take flight is the answer to OP's question.
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medicaApr 2 '14 at 2:05

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@medica It seems the term "birds take flight" is actually starting to take flight itself and become more popular: books.google.com/ngrams/… Take flight has been used for birds long before planes existed, but take off is now starting to increase with reference to birds because of the aeronautic equivalent.
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RonanApr 2 '14 at 10:50

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@Ronan, I prefer birds that take flight to birds that take off semantically. But the question is there a term for when birds start flying, the answer is yes, and it's take-off. Take-off is the noun, and the verb is take off. We usually strive for facts in our answers, and sources to back them up, rather than poetry. But your point is well made, and I concede that both are true. (And, your ngram now has more meaning.)
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medicaApr 2 '14 at 16:43

The problem with "take flight" (while I agree it sounds more elegant or at least more suitable for birds) is that it doesn't have an accompanying noun.

Wikipedia suggests "take-off" and "taking off", and I can see the benefits of that. For instance, without a noun, you can't really use "shallow" (though I think I'd try for something like "low angle", which is a bit more user friendly because of "take flight at a low angle").

It's logical. When you 'scorn' something you treat it as beneath you. But I cannot find any reference to such use in the OED, nor Oxford Dictionaries. Perhaps peculiar to Shelley. It does sound like something from the Romantic period.
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WS2Apr 1 '14 at 22:51